Freedom of thought, freedom from bureaucracy, freedom from white cubes, freedom from urban chic and smog:

etoy celebrates the Swiss national holiday on August 1 in Heiligkreuz, Lucerne, an old power place in central Switzerland full of Catholic magic, deep forests, and breathtaking vistas. We invite all flower people, spiritual travelers, bankers and other wayfaring (wo)men to leave their offices & teepees to check out the show "im anfang war das wort" where the MISSION ETERNITY SARCOPHAGUS landed:http://www.heiligkreuz09.ch/index.php?id=61

Walk through the outdoor art exhibition, enjoy rural Swiss cuisine and customs, chat with aborigines, watch the fireworks, and visit the MISSION ETERNITY PILOTS inside the SARCOPHAGUS. etoy.AGENTS will convince you that death is nothing but a rambling-scrambling rite de passage. Timothy Leary will join us from live from orbit!

Having failed at "Sein und Zeit" before, repeatedly and miserably, I'm most grateful to Dreyfus and Spinosa's essay on Heidegger, Borgmann and technology. Everyday life and our understanding of being embedded in a specific context allows us to make sense of our environment and act sensibly. In the authors' terminology, practices focus around things that exude their own ways of dealing with them, or with the situation, and remind us that we assume a specific behavior and sense a particular connection to the situation (a local identity) instead of all other options that we have in life. Our mortality reminds us that we could do things differently because time is scarce and we choose.

When he speaks of death, he does not mean demise or a medically defined death. He means an attribute of the way human practices work that causes mortals (later Heidegger's word for people who are inside a focal practice) to understand that they have no fixed identity and so must be ready to relinquish their current identity in order to assume the identity that their practices next call them into attunement with.

To understand oneself as mortal means to understand one's identity and world as fragile and temporary and requiring one's active engagement. In the case of the highway bridge, it means that, even while getting in tune with being a flexible resource, one does not understand oneself as being a resource all the time and everywhere. One does not always feel pressured, for instance, to optimize one's vacation possibilities by refusing to get stuck on back roads and sticking to the interstates. Rather, as one speeds along the overpass, one senses one's mortality, namely that one has other skills for bringing out other sorts of things, and therefore one is never wholly a resource. Hence, because one has in readiness other skills for dealing with other styles of things thinging, one can relate to the highway bridge not just as a transparent device but in its specificity as a way of bringing the technological ordering out in its ownmost. But that is to say that the highway bridge can be affirmed as a possible kind of focal thing that calls to us as mortals, only if there are other focal things around that preserve other styles in which things can thing.

Freeing us from having a total fixed identity so that we may experience ourselves as multiple identities disclosing multiple worlds is what Heidegger calls technology's saving power. (Dreyfus and Spinosa, 2003)

The disclosing activity is the essential entrepreneurial activity and it takes a "thorough contextual sensibility" (Steyaert, 2007: 462) to change practices that we experience. In other words, only if we experience a specific context can we be motivated to contribute to it in disclosing ways that carry the practice forward, create better quality, venture into new markets, challenge the rules, or abandon the practice altogether.

In the context of MISSION ETERNITY, this essay reminds us of two things: that to remember an individual requires capturing an extremely transient identity that only appears in time and in connection with a (local) practice. etoy's method of SCRAMBLING goes a long way towards capturing a moment and inscribing it into the global memory, indelibly and as an expression and disclosure of a mortal being at one particular moment in time.

Second, embracing technology is a valid and necessary strategy to characterize today's life and practices. Our dissolving and morphing identities that face the stand-by possibilities of access to infinite information make it ever more challenging to capture anything of our daily cyber-identities at all. Maybe, subversively, MISSION ETERNITY will end up bowing to the visionary and honest gesture of age-old burial cultures that reduce the memory of an individual to a time stamp simply because there is nothing more substantial of an identity that lasts.

INVITE: come and enjoy the etoy.TANKIMPLANT at binz, zurich, hidden on the terrasse in the arms of green thick shady trees, barbecuing and having a nice lazy chat. and you can visit the new urban experiment basislager, 120 containers with artists and chinese doctors and bike mechanics. we provide some drinks and salads, fire, friends, and please bring your meat!

to get an impression of how art will be "consumed" in the future check out this youtube video that lev manovich sent me tonight while i was searching for references to his ideas about the post-compression-age.

BTW: The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UCSD in San Diego (where etoy built its first TANK in 1998) is involved in this studies.

ANGEL APPLICATION version 0.4.4 has just been released.
This release introduces major speed improvements in the maintenance algorithm
which should result in maintaining local replicas a lot quicker, while
preserving network resources during normal maintenance.

In practice:

For desktop users, the maintenance process will find individual local broken
resources (e.g. also new resources / deleted resources) much faster than in
earlier versions. This only holds true if the sleep interval is small, e.g. if
the maintainer has just been started (by default, the maintainer will
incrementally adjust its speed of operation to fit into one day).

For server installation, e.g. long-running instances, it means that a lot less
traffic will be generated during the maintenance.

Note: the initial sync is still slow and will be optimized in future releases.

The changes are basically summarized as follows:

initial support for doing remote clone validation based on random chunks of data. Implemented using standard HTTP byte range headers. This should lead to MASSIVE bandwidth savings.

improvements in clone resolution: clones with numeric IP addresses are thrown away if a clone with a hostname resolving to this address exists.

mount now forces the remote clone to be saved locally, even if the initial inspection fails.

bugfix in maintenance: when no local clones are stored, recursively walk up the tree to find some

broadcasting of local clone to remote clones optimized (e.g. dropped reachability and existence checks, as broadcasting is allowed to fail).

improved KDE/Gnome support for opening the WebDAV repository.

optimized server side HEAD operation for directories by not computing a content listing.

etoy calls all flower people, apple nerds, spiritual travelers, bankers and other wayfaring (wo)men to leave their offices & teepees to check out the show "im anfang war das wort" in Entlebuch/Switzerland.

After successfull return from orbit the 5,32 tons of steel hammered down on the First near Heiligkreuz/LU: http://www.heiligkreuz09.ch/index.php?id=61 The container is expected to carry key code for etoy's ANGEL APPLICATION and 4 GB of new data from Tim Leary and Sepp Keiser as well as a ritual object for sepulchre ceremonies at Ars Electronica 2009 in Linz, the world’s leading media arts festival (3. - 8. 9. 2009: Human Nature / the anthropocen http://www.aec.at/humannature/index_de.html)

Since the clash of art and nature in Motiers (art en plain air 2007), and all the psychedelic experiences up there, etoy.AGENTS are raring to go back into wild and spend the summer of 2009 in the mountains: a public STOWAWAY ENCAPSULATION WORKSHOP (register here: http://www.heiligkreuz09.ch/index.php?id=etoy), agent retreats, meetings, further data gathering sessions with test pilots and an etoy.CHILDREN summer camp are on the list.